Friday, April 4, 2014

Compulsion and Worldy Love, and the Great Contradiction

All worldly love becomes a form of compulsion of one kind or another.
All heavenly love originates as what we call a letting go.
Heavenly love expresses itself through the unfettering and release of whatever is, so that it can find its own Being. Being voluntarily in relationship with Being represents true love, but being coerced into relationship with being is always, ultimately, a destructive force. So Love within Being must be cultivated only through release and attraction; this is the correct action of love.

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't have Being; that is to say, our hearts have not been opened to an inflow from the angelic realms. As long as we're under strictly earthly influences, which is to say, influences from this level, the only things that can come of it are things of this level, and things of this level are always in conflict with one another, because that is its nature—and our own.

No matter how much we develop, in a certain sense, under the conditions we are in, we always act from compulsive love, not from heavenly love. This is what I would call the Great Contradiction, that is, the contradiction from which all other contradictions derive themselves. In the Great Contradiction, we are actually opposed to the real principle of Love, which is universal, ever-flowing, and emanates directly from God. When I explained that the sun (and, by default, all suns) is an aperture through which God's influence flows into this universe, the influence I am referring to is Divine Love. The fundamental source of remorse of conscience can only be the conscious (that is, simultaneous three-centered) recognition of the difference between my own love and Divine Love; because any effort to distinguish remorse based on other principles is always to attach it to outward circumstances and deeds, whereas the fundamental error is always an inward or inner one. And when I speak about de Salzmann’s seeing my lack, which I recently reconfigured under the concept of heavenly doubt, the lack that I must always ultimately see is the difference between these two kinds of love. This seeing, furthermore, must be organic, not intellectual.

A careful examination of every interaction that purportedly reflects love on this level always reveals compulsion of one kind or another, that is, an effort to force something. Because Love, at its root (which because of its ineffable origin is ultimately obscured from our inner vision), always begins from that secret and sacred seed of Divine Love, it begins well. In fact, it begins perfectly. But it immediately changes when it emerges from the Divine Seed into thought, and in this moment, it begins to want for itself. If we wanted to identify the instant in which sleep begins in mankind, it is here; because in this instant where love transforms itself to something that has a wish solely for the good of itself, instead of a wish for the good of all other things, it becomes a selfish force — and this, of course, is the opposite of what love is, or, at least, ought to be. That is, love is absolutely unselfish in its original nature, but absolutely selfish in the nature in which it expresses itself in us. And we have to look at the root of things when we examine this, because the many gradations that later derive from it are not the point.

So what is inner work for? We need to acquire being in order to open our hearts to the influence from the angelic realms. This is the point of work, the point, that is, of inner development, at which things can change, and something real can take place. At the moment that the higher energy of the angelic realms flows into Being, a transformation begins to take place in which remorse of conscience can begin. Even so, this flow of the Divine influence takes many years to transform Being in a meaningful way. Remorse has to act very long and very deep to effect a realignment.

We are all in the grip of the Great Contradiction. When you read about the various tensions in the body, the mind, and the emotions as they were iterated by Gurdjieff, and, later, by his many adepts and followers, you are reading about nothing more than many different specific instances of the Great Contradiction, which breaks itself into pieces and infects all of the centers. The Great Contradiction is, in a certain sense, a viral force that uses its RNA of selfishness to co-opt the original genetic material of Divine Love and replicate itself, spreading further and further throughout Being over the course of a lifetime. This is, to be sure, a conceptual approach to the matter; but because all of the universe is connected, and everything reflects itself, the principles of viral replication are very much the same as the principles of the replication of destructive forces. Viral replication is, to be precise, what Swedenborg would have called a correspondence.

In any event, the Great Contradiction that we find ourselves in is this compulsory and compulsive love, which uses force to achieve what it wants. A careful examination of one's action in life reveals that this contradiction goes on over and over; and the contradiction is prosecuted in an inner sense as well as an outer one. So I use compulsion against myself; and I use compulsion against others; and in both cases, I delude myself by saying that it is, in one way or another, loving. In reality, love is a material force that has absolutely nothing to do with me or these actions; but because I have little or no material experience of Divine Love, I’m unable to understand this.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.